A Palm Springs Noir, My Sweet

Palm Springs Noir? The words suggest steamy doings in bone-dry terrain: crimes amid the cactus, double-crossing and doubling down in the precious palm-lined oases that secure a lush life for some but hardly for all. Palm Springs Noir is a terrific new anthology from Akashic, which has made a point of publishing geographically-inspired noir story collections for decades. (Copenhagen Noir, anyone?) The editor of this latest volume in the series is Barbara DeMarco-Barrett—writer, editor, and desert-lover—who happens to be my longtime friend and colleague.

 The writers in Barbara’s collection (including big names like Janet Fitch and T. Jefferson Parker) were carefully chosen both for their talent and their familiarity with Palm Springs and surrounding towns. Each casts a jaundiced eye on the staples of this landscape: swimming pools, mid-century-modern décor, trailer parks, Airbnb rentals, gardeners spritzing the luxuriant foliage despite a dwindling water supply.

 Film Noir of course is the term that French cinéastes have applied to the tough-minded black-&-white thrillers that Hollywood churned out in great numbers circa 1940. Think Double Indemnity and other flicks in which dames like Barbara Stanwyck were up to no good. So it occurred to me to wonder, given how much Hollywood types in the Forties loved to frolic in Palm Springs, whether any films of the noir era depicted that locale. Eric Beetner, whose “The Guest” is one of the gems of the new collection, admitted to me that surprisingly few films were set in the Palm Springs environs during the noir era. While the ending of High Sierra was indeed shot near Palm Springs’ high-desert region, he mostly cited obscure entries like The Threat, “a good and underseen movie with the amazing Charles McGraw.” But Beetner also came up with a 1990 neo-noir that seemed worth checking out. Which is how I came to watch 1990’s After Dark, My Sweet, shot entirely in the Palm Springs-adjacent city of Indio. (Indio, a blue-collar town once best known for date-growing but now the site of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, is the setting for a creepy Tod Goldberg story, “A Career Spent Disappointing People,” that continues to haunt me.)

 After Dark, My Sweet, based on a Jim Thompson novel, involves such noir staples aa a down-at-the-heels ex-boxer, a beautiful widow, and a shifty guy out to make a buck. There’s cool voiceover narration and a twisty plot about a kidnapping gone awry. Director James Foley, who got his start directing Madonna’s music videos, has a terrific eye for desert landscapes as well as for the watering holes of the rich and the would-be-rich. This is a noir with a difference, of course, because it’s shot in full color, thus depriving the film of the moody shadows that made 1940s cinema so evocative. In their place is Foley’s careful use of color, with its calculated splashes of crimson and blood-red. And the film’s big sex scene, carefully prepared for and long in coming, is far more explicit than anything the Forties might have been able to show. (Curiously, it’s male lead Jason Patric, not the stunning Rachel Ward, whose bare skin is on nearly-full display.) Patric, who also in 1990 would be featured as Lord Byron in Roger Corman’s regrettable return to directing, Frankenstein Unbound, makes a strong lead here, one both tender and volatile, smart and not-so-smart. And Ward’s character is perhaps more complex than most of the femmes fatales we know and love. But it’s Bruce Dern’s Uncle Bud I’ll long remember: a guy loathsome and yet almost lovable, a friendly fellow defined by greed, a true denizen of a film noir world.

 

Notes from the Noir Fest: The World in Black and White

It’s always a kick to attend Hollywood’s Noir City festival, hosted by Eddie Muller and Alan Rode, honchos of the Film Noir Foundation. The venue is the historic Egyptian Theatre, which opened in 1922 with a lavish premiere of Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks. I’ve just learned that the theatre slightly pre-dates the mania for all things Egyptian that was sparked by the excavation of King Tut’s tomb later that same year. The Egyptian Theatre was exhibitor Sid Grauman’s primo showplace until the opening of the even kitschier Grauman’s Chinese, also on Hollywood Blvd., in 1927. Later the Egyptian sank into seediness, then was purchased from the city of Los Angeles by the American Cinematheque, with a mandate to restore it to its former glory.

When attending a screening at the Egyptian,. I always feel myself immersed in both Old Hollywood glamour and the slightly chaotic, slightly down-at-the-heels atmosphere that is Hollywood Blvd. today. There are fading mural of big-name celebs, and sidewalk stars dedicated to Tinseltown types I’ve never heard of.  There are hustlers and gawkers and street people looking for a handout. There’s the venerable Larry Edmunds Bookshop, dedicated to all things movie-related, where I’m always sure of a warm welcome from Jeff, the long-time proprietor. And, of course, there’s Musso & Frank Grill, as old as the Egyptian, a watering hole where dry martinis and prime steaks have been served to everyone who was anyone in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The menu’s still classic, the booths are still full, and the food is great!

After being impeccably served at Musso’s (thanks for dinner, Alan!), I crossed the boulevard to the Chinese. The evening’s presentations included two Fifties noirs from Paramount Pictures, one of them rarely seen. I just read that Paramount, following some big flops of late, is feeling optimistic on the strength of its new low-budget thriller, A Quiet Place. The movies featured on this evening’s Noir City program are low-budget too, but very different from the rural environment captured by writer/director/star John Krasinski. Like most film noirs they are black-and-white evocations of an urban environment, one in which crime and chicanery abound. Part of the pleasure of a film noir is spotting L.A. landmarks (the Angel’s Flight funincular, Hollywood Forever cemetery, the Beverly Hills Hotel, a boxing match at the old Olympic Auditorium), even in films that theoretically take place somewhere in the mid-west. 

Paramount’s 1952 The Turning Point is not a ballet movie (that would have to wait until 1977), but rather a drama in which idealistic prosecutor Edmund O’Brien is not nearly so effective as hard-boiled journalist William Holden in ferreting out organized crime. Alexis Smith is the love interest          , and the ending is appropriately downbeat. The twisty 1956 crime thriller Scarlet Street features several new Michael Curtiz discoveries who never made it big (seductress Carol Ohmart among them). There’s a jewel heist, lots of double-crossing, and a guest appearance by Nat “King” Cole singing “Never Let Me Go.” 

But the biggest pleasure of old film noirs may be the wonderful mugs they assemble among the supporting cast. There’s craggy Ed Begley as a crime boss, Carolyn Jones in a teeny role as a floozy on the witness stand, E.G. Marshall as a stone-faced cop, and a whole assort of big lugs, skinny weasel-types (Danny Dayton!), and other nogoodniks. Maybe best of all, Broadway’s raucous Elaine Stritch shows up as the leading lady’s gal pal to provide comic relief. 

Life in the noirs always seems so, well, black and white. I can’t wait until next year. 

Noir City continues through Sunday, April 22.